Here are my tips for getting more done in less time:

1. Stay focused on the important work. Keep your eye on the work that will have the biggest impact, and make sure you finish the most important work first. Don’t get caught up in tasks, even those that seem urgent, if they aren’t really important.
2. Learn keyboard shortcuts. The more you can do without taking your fingers off of the keyboard, the faster you’ll finish your work, so take the time to learn available keyboard shortcuts for commonly-used tasks. Email, RSS readers, browsers and any other frequently-used apps are good places to start. Keyboard shortcuts aren’t only available in desktop apps; many web apps, such as Google Reader and Gmail, also have keyboard shortcuts.
3. Know whom to ask for help. If you can spend less time trying to figure things out for yourself, you can get more done. Make connections with people in your company and your industry you can ask for help. However, you’ll need to be prepared to help others, too.
4. Filter anything you can. If you get really good at automatically filtering out the noise, you can focus only on what you really need to see. Set up filters wherever possible: in your email, RSS reader and more.
5. Learn to skim. If you get good at skimming over content without reading every word, you can quickly determine which items require your attention and which ones can be ignored. This works for reading social network posts, news and email.
6. Touch once. This one is hard for me to stick with, but when I do it, it really makes a difference. For email or other communications, look over it and decide what to do with it right away: archive, respond, create a task item, flag for followup, etc. Regardless of how you process communications, just make sure you deal with them once rather than looking at them multiple times.
7. Take control of your calendar. I’m really proactive about my calendar, and I only attend meetings where there is some benefit from my attendance. If you want to have time to get any real work done, you’ll probably need to occasionally decline meetings.
8. Become the master of your email. Don’t let email control you. Finding ways to reduce email overload and proactively deal with email will allow you to spend less time on email and more time on actual work.
9. Work in chunks and focus. Despite what some might think, humans are not great at multitasking. We work better when we focus on one thing at a time. I do this by breaking my work up into logical chunks where I can focus on specific tasks.
10. Get really good at using search engines. Learn little tricks for your favorite search engine. For example, with Google, you could search for “productivity site:gigaom.com/collaboration” to find all of the productivity tips posted on this blog. Spending less time looking for information means that you can get more done.
11. Automate routine tasks. For any mundane tasks that you perform manually over and over, you should find a way to automate them if at all possible. I write scripts, automatically process email with rules and filter RSS feeds to automate tasks and spend less time on things I can have the computer do for me.
12. Prune. Have less data to process. Dump those irrelevant newsletter subscriptions, drop the social network contacts who don’t have anything interesting to say and prune feeds out of your RSS reader. Focus on the important information and get rid of the rest.
13. Keep it simple. When faced with any task, look for ways to keep things simple and avoid spending time on complexity that doesn’t add much value. Simple document formatting is a good example. Focus on the content that matters without getting too caught up in having elaborate formatting that could create more maintenance problems later.
14. Get news from podcasts. I pick and choose the news sources important to me with a combination of mainstream news and news on niche technology topics, and I listen to that news when I’m doing household chores, driving, grocery shopping, working out and more. I get only the news I want, and I listen to it at times I wouldn’t otherwise be productive, which allows me to keep up with industry news while spending little time on it.
15. Take time to recharge. If you work constantly, you’ll look like you are busy, but you’ll burn yourself out. If you really want to be productive, you need to take time to workout, do something fun, take a vacation, read or do something else relaxing. You’ll find that you come back to work with new ideas and focused energy to make a real impact.

Share your productivity tips below.

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Even though PDF is a fantastic format for sharing documents, (as discussed in the last Monday Time Saver post) viewing them in a browser can be annoying.  Typically, you either have to download and open them in Adobe Acrobat or view them in the browser (which can cause your browser to crash).  When it comes right down to it, opening a PDF can be cumbersome task.

With the web application called PDFMeNot, you by bypass the need to open a separate reader application by opening the PDF directly inside your browser.  This handy application called “A nicer way of linking to your PDFs” and instantly makes the PDF viewable in side a viewable in-browser display.

Tracking your online time with 8aweek

The web can be a very distracting place.  Getting caught up in ‘web surfing’ can drastically hinder our ability to get work done.  8aweek is a Firefox plug-in that helps you account for your time on the web.  You can easily use 8aweek to add some hard numbers to how long you spend on specific web sites that may not be additive to your professional career.

8aweek lumps sites together, so if you spend time on CNet’s News.com (looking at work news items) and CNet.com (looking for a new digital toy), all your time will be reported as visiting CNet.com.  Additionally, time spend in Google Reader will be lumped in with time searching at Google.com.  With 8aweek, you can restrict the time you spend on different sites, depending on your personal preferences.

Move your email around between Gmail accounts

Lifehacker recently posted tips regarding moving your email between Gmail accounts.  Why would you want to do this?  Have you ever opened a second Gmail account, perhaps one for business and one for personal?  How would you easily move a large quantity of messages been the two accounts?  Using Lifehacker’s techniques, this becomes easy.

The method for doing this begins by enabling POP access on your first Gmail account (the mailbox your copying items out of).  Then, log out of the first Gmail account and log in to your second Gmail account (the one your copying items into).  Within the second account, click on Settings, then Accounts.  In the Get mail from other accounts section, click “Add another mail account”.  Enter in your settings, following the screenshot below as an example.

Your old messages will be imported in automatically by Gmail.  You may want to go back and turn on forwarding to your new account and disabling POP access, whichever is best for your situation.

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